The Green Pastures dvd movie.|
The Green Pastures buy bestselling dvd movies, videos find reviews, ratings, prices |
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List Price: $19.98 Our Price: $14.99 You Save: $4.99 Features • Closed-captioned • Color • DVD-Video • Subtitled • NTSC In Theaters : 22 June, 1935 DVD Release : 10 January, 2006 |
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The Green Pastures description "Gangway for de Lawd God Jehovah!" Despite racial stereotypes and a naive, backward vision of "Negro Heaven," The Green Pastures remains an important, controversial, and still-entertaining milestone in African American popular culture. Because this 1936 spiritual musical embraces all of the black stereotypes that were prevalent in its time, Warner Home Video has appropriately included a disclaimer regarding the political incorrectness of the film's then-common racial prejudices, stressing the importance of acknowledging these stereotypes as opposed to pretending they never existed. With this understanding, The Green Pastures still endures as a classic American folk drama, based on Marc Connelly's Pulitzer Prize-wining Broadway production (suggested by Roark Bradford's southern sketches "Ol' Man Adam an' His Chillun"), in which several Old Testament stories are performed as they might be imagined by black Sunday-school child in the Depression-era South. It's an all-black vision of heaven as a perpetual fish-fry, full of black angels and cherubs eating catfish and smoking 10-cent "see-gars," where "De Lawd" (Rex Ingram) presides over the tales of creation: Noah and the Flood; Joshua at Jericho; Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; Adam and Eve; Moses and Pharaoh; etc. With heavenly accompaniment by the Hall Johnson Choir, these Bible stories play like a lavish fantasy revival, and while the stereotypical images and all-black colloquialisms may seem absurdly regressive from the perspective of latter-day enlightenment, there's no denying that The Green Pastures is still a transcendently joyful celebration of faith. As a relic of its time, it's a vivid (and for some, still uncomfortable) reminder that racial stereotypes--even in a joyful gospel context--can teach us a lot about where we've been, and where we've yet to go. --Jeff Shannon On the DVD |
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| ♥♥♥♥♥ | The spirituals are fine but the film is a naive caricature |
| When we know the author of the original stories is white, the film shows perfectly well how the American society, after slavery and after - up to the 1850s - banning the Blacks from all training into reading and writing, from all speaking their original languages and even from all affiliation to any religion, rushes head first into over-Christianizing the Blacks with no cautious slowing down and with all calculated speeding up they could master after the Secession War, both south and north, though for different reasons. The objective was to cast the Blacks into the mold of the unexplainable will of God and the necessity to suffer in this world to be saved in the next one. The interest of this film cannot be found in the ethics of the story. Maybe only - at this level - in the exploration of the arcane sophistication of the alienation, imposed onto the Blacks. But the real interest is the large presence of Negro spirituals in the film, one of the very first films entirely centered on Black music, though in 1936 we must not forget we are after - and within - the triumph of the radio that enabled Black music and jazz to find a wide audience, to embed its existence and force into the widest Black and white audience it had ever had, just as it enabled F. D. Roosevelt to dominate the political arena for twelve years or so. Yet the film is tremendously deficient. The desire to have only Black actors in the film locks up the Blacks in a color ghetto. It appears as pure segregation against the whites. It does not help us much understand the great musical revolution the Blacks brought to the American continent. They live their music, their religion and their everyday life in the total absence of whites except in one scene where the whites are Ku Klux Klan members lynching a whole bunch of Blacks for no other apparent reason than the excitement of the hunt. At times the biblical stories told to us are so naive and simple-minded that we can wonder whether we are talking to people provided with a brain. The music itself is very average. Luckily this exclusively Black cinema has not been furthered beyond the few films the late 1920s and the 1930s produced. They were leading to a complete dead end as for understanding or simply reflecting the real situation in which the Blacks are living and which they may want to change. What's more the reduction of the whites to KKK members is definitely a racist caricature.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines |
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